I have long been a fan of
good writing- whatever the genre. I have mercilessly attacked the pap that has
been fobbed off as good in both poetry & its criticism. & while I’ve
not assailed it (due mostly to lack of interest) I could also lob grenades at
the crap that passes for intelligent prose (fiction & non-fiction). But 1
genre has had- for the last 3 decades or so- an astounding rise to an absolute
Golden (if not Platinum) Era of writing- the genre is science writing. Not only
are the writers intelligent scientists with good & interesting ideas- but
they are GOOD (often VERY GOOD) writers- commanders of words. Among the writers
that have seen this Renaissance through are Carl Sagan, Timothy Ferris, Paul
Davies, Martin Rees, & others in astronomy & cosmology; & Jacob
Bronowski, David Attenborough, Jared Diamond, & others in the earth &
human sciences. But the most engaging writers & debates have been held in
the fields of geology, anthropology, & evolution. Writers/scientists such as
Luis & Walter Alvarez, Jack Horner, Richard Dawkins, Simon Conway Morris,
& especially the recently deceased Stephen Jay Gould. This is not to imply
earlier science writers were not present, or occasionally great- my
& Jason Sanford’s takes on the transcendent
prose of Loren Eiseley are familiar to regular readers of Cosmoetica- but they
were far rarer than what exists now.

The Globular World Of Gould

Stephen Jay Gould, 60,
died of lung cancer on Monday, May 20th, 2002 in his Manhattan
apartment. SJG was born September 10th, 1941, & was best known
for his essays, This View Of Life, which appeared for 27 years in Natural
History magazine, his lampooning on The Simpsons tv show, his
appearances as an evolutionary expert on many tv news shows, & as a baseball
expert (& New York Yankees fan) on Ken Burns’s PBS documentary Baseball.
But he was also a lecturer, zoologist, paleontologist, anti-Creationist,
defender of free speech, author of over 1000 scientific papers, MacArthur genius
grant winner (in its 1st year), prolific essayist (300+ in all for Natural
History alone, & many in other venues) & booksmith, expert on the
extinct Cerion land snails of the Bahamas, leading Darwinian devotee, &
founder (along with Niles Eldredge) of the Punctuated Equilibrium theory
of evolution. He was 1 of the most influential evolutionary biologists of the
last century & other than Charles Darwin perhaps the only 1 whose name a
layman could vaguely place.

PE was his best known
theory & posited that evolution in the fossil record comes in short bursts
of profound change rather than the steady process of incrementation. This &
other ideas (as well as his status as pop icon) made SJG a lightning rod- at
once reviled by both Creationists- for his merciless ridiculing of their belief
systems, as well as more straight-forward evolutionists who saw nothing new in
his ideas, except a clever use of semiotics to disguise the known & accepted
as new & revolutionary. Many colleagues credit his PE theory
with promoting the field of macroevolution, where researchers study large-scale
evolutionary changes, over a long-term geological time frame.

But, he had a popular
audience for science in the last 50 years that only astronomer Carl Sagan
surpassed. His books actually sold well enough to greatly supplement his
lifestyle- already high as a tenured Harvard professor. The book titles alone,
stuck in public consciousness: Bully for Brontosaurus being his most
well-known work. SJG had a peerless gift for melding the high & pop aspects
of science seamlessly. While not as popular as a Sagan, nor as deep a thinker or
good a writer as an Eiseley, nor as revered a scientist as a Dawkins, he had
aspects of all of them that made him a unique presence in American & world
science. & even when his ideas proved to be sometimes embarrassingly wrong-
such as his speculative & whimsical account of the Burgess Shale fossils of
the Cambrian Explosion of over ½ a billion years ago, recorded in Wonderful
Life, & easily picked apart by his nemesis Simon Conway Morris in his
own book The Crucible of Creation- SJG’s popularity & demand as a
public ombudsman for the sciences was undiminished. His public persona as a pit
bull for science & against ignorance, in fact, got its start with his 1970s
classic The Mismeasure Of Man, where he tore apart the pseudoscience
undergirding many racist ideologies. For this, & other reasons, he was often
branded a Marxist by political enemies, & a Messiah by Leftists with little
going in their lives, save for hero worship..

But ideologues & SCM
were not his only detractors. Richard Dawkins labeled him a semantic
game-player, that PE was merely regular evolutionary change under a microscope,
& that no one had before doubted that there are periods of swift change
& little change- it was merely how 1 geologically (& somewhat
Clintonistically) defined swift. Others argued his theories- & even
his writings- were so vague & difficult to pin down that they were
untestable- therefore not really science, but philosophy. Microevolutionists,
ala RD, rejected his arguments by echoing that macroevolution is nothing more
than microevolution played out over long periods. John Maynard Smith, an
evolutionary biologist at University of Sussex in England, declared evolutionary
biologists ‘tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be
hardly worth bothering with.’ Others even saw his supposed PE modification
of Darwinian theory as aiding & abetting the very Creationists SJG reviled.

But, at the heart of it
all- SJG was more than anything a writer over a scientist. He was an
entertaining writer often hailed as saving the dying art form of the scientific
essay- & could be just as entertaining when he was wrong as when he was
right. He often pulled together unrelated ideas or things, with varying success:
1 essay started by noting Abe Lincoln & Charles Darwin were born on the same
day. Another, in 1982 (after being diagnosed with terminal cancer), titled,
‘The Median is not the Message’, described discovering that the median
survival time after diagnosis of the cancer abdominal mesothelioma was 8
months. Rather than give up, he wrote that he used his knowledge of statistics
to translate this ‘death sentence’ into the hope that 50% of those diagnosed
lived longer than 8 months- this gave him the resolve to fight on another 2
decades. Others drew from & delved into art, sports, history, &
entertainment- from the Piltdown Man hoax to candy bars. SJG was known to often
embellish his youth- the best known of these anecdotes (or canards?) was of his
decision to become a paleontologist when he was 5, after his dad took him to the
Museum of Natural History. He wrote: ‘I dreamed of becoming a scientist, in
general, and a paleontologist, in particular, ever since the Tyrannosaurus
skeleton awed and scared me.’

This past March, Harvard
University Press published SJG’s magnum opus, The Structure of
Evolutionary Theory. This 1400+ page book summarizes his vision for
synthesizing Darwin’s ideas with his own. It will be interesting to see how
this now dead man is treated by those who scorned him when alive. But to the
masses, & to me, I will always savor his writing style, while cringing at
his sometimes less-than-well-cogitated ideas. The closest writer I can use as an
analogue would be noted film critic Roger Ebert. Both SJG & RE’s writings
have been much praised by me for their style- even as I often disagree
wholeheartedly with their premises. But, then, that is 1 of the things that
defines a great writer- relaying the ability to appreciate HOW something is
said, even if you do not like WHAT is said.

I admit to finding SJG’s
constant misuse of Charles Darwin as having a connection to everything under the
sun tiresome; as well as his almost pathological misuse of mediocre-bad poetry
as epigraphs & quotes with little- or no- connection to a point essayed. I
found much of his worldview insular- as if he existed in 1 of those little
liquid globes bearing an idyllic scene you shake so snow falls all over in
Rockwellian splendor. But, there are times when he delved in to memory & I
am stirred to almost Eiseleyan heights. In thinking of his recent death I was
moved to recall a certain aspect of my youth I’d long dismissed- 1 with
certain cogencies to recent events in my life which have prompted me to seek to
change aspects of my current circumstance.

The Gerhardt’s Peach Tree

About 11 or so years ago-
in the last couple of months before I was planning to move from my New York City
childhood stomping grounds to the newer pastures of suburban Minnesota- I got
into my parked Honda Civic to go to work, & noticed something I had
not seen before. The peach tree in the backyard of my boyhood friend Ricky Gerhardt’s family’s house was a towering Goliathon- at least 65-70 feet in
height. I had ended my friendship with Ricky almost a decade earlier, & had
never really taken note of the tree’s growth, even as I often passed it to get
to my parked car. I tend to not look backward in life (go ahead & grin,
Satchel!), & avoided contact with most of the Gerhardt clan. As kids, growing
up in the late 1970s Ricky, I, his brothers, & other neighborhood kids had
often used the peach tree as a climbing vehicle to get to the top of that rarest
of rarities in NYC- the Gerhardt’s own 2 car garage! Usually we made the ascent
to retrieve a spaldeen or tennis ball that found its way out of our reach, but
sometimes we’d just do it for fun. On hot summer days 1 of the most
interesting sights I can recall would often be festering on that garage’s
tarpaper roof. A few days old peach would be firmly stuck & rotting into the
black liquid tar, which would further serve to cook the fruit. This would
attract a whole bevy of assorted insects to try their luck at sustenance. Often
mini-wars would break out between assorted flies, crickets, mosquitoes, &
bugs I knew no name for. How I, & other boys would stare at the
micro-carnage that raged for this tiny piece of insectoid Eden. How taken I was
with the brief, nonetheless thrilling, slight rise above diurnal do. How
wonderful it was to have eye & tongue & palm coated with the scent &
gunk of nature as we ascended to an epicentral urban domain.

But, that was all in the
past as I stared momentarily at this tree I had once shared intimacy &
adventure with. The tree was now rarely used by anyone save for the rather
mundane purpose of its diminishing annual harvest. As said, a decade of a broken
friendship with Ricky had also distanced me from nearing the Gerhardts’
property- even as they lived almost directly across the street from us. Such the
ways of New Yorkers, that even as they are crammed tighter & tighter they
find novel & not-so novel ways to create their own spaces. Often this leads
to schizophrenia- or worse. For me, however, I always had the ability to simply
tune out what was not agreeable. As a child the tree had been perhaps only 20-25
feet tall tops (1/3 of its then-current height)- barely enough that its thicker
branches could bear our nimble boyhoods upward to the sun. Now, a full-grown
onlooker & climber could peer lasciviously into the Gerhardts’ 2nd
story bedrooms. But, it is that moment of actual ‘notice’ that sticks with
me today, as I ponder aspects of my own life that frustrate & dissatisfy me.
Was this merely an example of the same phenomenon a long-lost relative feels
when they comment on ‘How much you’ve grown!’ after a decade or more of
non-acquaintance from toddlerhood to teenagedom? Or had part of me been aware of
the tree’s ascendance, but ignored it, as if it were a marker of what had been
sundered between me & Ricky- who had once seemed a brother to me- or, more
profoundly, then & now? Then & there I thought of how many other things
in my existence had gone unremarked on. I wondered how much more, in the future,
would similarly go unnoticed? Not just unappreciated, mind you, but actually
unnoticed- at least consciously. A decade later, a part of me often feels an
irretrievable loss over what would have been my life had I stayed in NYC. I will
wake up, thinking it’s 3:45 am, & I have to get to work to take in the
milk delivery for the supermarket dairy department I used to manage. Then it
goes. Just goes. No profundity, no pop- it just vanishes. No- vanishes
implies some drama- it merely disintegrates in the passing seconds. I have
probably experienced that dream 100s of times, yet recall it only from the score
or so times I awakened from the dream & wrote it down. What if I still
managed that dairy department? This I ponder, despite my knowing that my life is
immeasurably better than it would have been had I not left. This decade which
saw me gain many new insights to life, expand my work skills, assume the mantle
of excellence & greatness in literature, fall in love & marry someone I
doubted could be. Yet I remark on it all, as I remarked on my notice of the
peach tree- that brief moment of recognition. I call it ‘recognition’ &
not insight because recognition was all it was. I gained nothing but a respite
(& arguably this decade-late essay) from a time I was not happy with my
life.

Still, I journey backward
to those insect wars over slowly marinating dead peaches, & concurrently
travel forward to imagine where I will be in another 5 or 10 or 30 years. As any
artist of worth, I wonder if that worth will get its due- not for fame
nor personal stature, so much, as to know that worthiness, itself, will get its
just desserts. The sense of a slowly percolating ooze which consumes always
lingers about my thoughts of life. It is as if I am rapt with a queer
fascination over whether or not it will finally cook all of my plans. Or is it
the fascination with dying- which, truth to tell, is the twin fascinations with
time & change? Ah, these things which stick- these tarpapers which surround
us in our ignorance!

I have seen alot of death-
most of it violent- in my closing in on 4 decades of life. I wrote a series of
poems, 13 Murders, on my childhood encounters with death. My dad died
when I was 18. My natural/birth mother died before I could ever meet her. Within
the 1st 5 years of graduating from high school at least 5 or 6 of my
H.S.-era running buddies were dead, or presumed dead. Several poor young women
who were already lost in an anomic world of cruelty & sexual abuse also met
death (or murder) face on. Worst of all, to me- emotionally- I guess, were the
deaths of beloved pets- my cats: rascally white & gray Suzy-Q, in 1976, of
feline leukemia; 25 lb.- but rock solid- lovable tuxedoed behemoth Fearless
Fred, aka Freddy, in 1990; his tortoise-shelled runt/companion, the eternally
scaredy-cat Kitty, in 1995; & 3 other short-term pets: weeks-old abandoned
kitten Reggie, in 1980; & 1990’s gray tabby/alleycat Darren & 1993’s
near Darren-clone Buster- both of feline AIDS. Oddly, their deaths linger in me
at nights when I cannot sleep. These things come back to me at the oddest of
times. As I write this it is because a few days ago our year & a ½ old
female black & white housecat Chia escaped & is missing. While hopeful
of recovering her the idea of her never returning, or extending my prior list,
haunts & taunts. Yet, my other cats return to me in different ways for
seemingly no reason at all. That the Gerhardt’s peach tree, & its decaying
fruit do, too, is a puzzle. These are things which meant something, apparently,
deeper than I consciously knew. Or is it mere jetsam? I do not know. I am loath
to follow the Joseph Campbell lead & imbue everything with profound meaning
since the bulk of my (&, yes, your) existence bespeaks the
absurdity of that view. I see no great profundity in the nightly unspooling of
our minds called dreaming. Perhaps my dead cats & dead comrades are just
glitches that skip some fondnesses back my way, like a repeating song line from
a damaged 45 record in its record player? Who knows? I relay these thoughts,
however, because upon reading of SJG’s death the other day I had a similar
reaction- that this death of a person I knew nothing of personally would somehow
stick with me a bit longer than the usual news fare. Did I breathe deeper? Did I
stumble upon some deep revelation that would alter my life? No. But I think SJG,
like the Gerhardt’s peach tree, was something I always enjoyed- but in a
background way. Those things that you do not notice until you do, again, because
they have disappeared or changed. These are the things which truly meld &
blend in to the background noise of existence because they do not move 1 to nor
fro to any great degree- they are a wisp of something, & only affect us when
we want of wisps.

SJG was a wisp. Not the
man, but the words he relayed, titled as SJG. Reading SJG’s essays, whether
annoying or inspiring, also made me feel that there was another of my tribe out
there- meaning someone who, if they did not think like me at least
thought- & with some purpose, in this anomic cosmos. &
just like 1 does not declare their fondness for some ‘thing’ in a
neighbor’s backyard, 1 would not broach actual dialogue with that thing-
SJG’s essays- lest someone think it odd. But, 1 day, that changed. It was
sometime in the early-mid 90s. It was early in my tenure in the manic state of
Minnesota. I forget what prompted my writing a letter to SJG, c/o The Museum
Of Natural History, but I did. It must have been an irksome reaction to 1 of
his essays or books. What the bulk of my missive was eludes me now, but I recall
an ancillary rebuke to him for his often embarrassing use of poetry. I believe
the prompt was an essay on defenestration & the Diet Of Worms- what so
offended or provoked or moved me is now will-o-the-you-know-whatting.
Fortunately, SJG was too busy or too haughty to reply. I say fortunately not
because I feared a rebuke, but because it would have violated the structure of
my relation to this producer of essays- that thing aforementioned. It
would have been a crack in both of our little separate but coexistent globes, a
mixture of event-fluids that would have removed the ‘specialness’- or, at
least, the ‘place’- of his writing from my life. It would have been like my
interacting with the ants upon those rotting peaches under a since-past sun,
over my childhood best friend’s garage. Had I done that I would have had
little or no memory of the peaches, & likely no gape during my later notice
of the peach tree’s growth; if indeed there would have been notice within me.
This is 1 of those things that I realize makes little sense intellectually- to
you, or even to me, frankly. But, I believe, you all know what I mean- even if
your peach tree & your essays-to-be-read are not trees nor essays. The point
is that intellect has almost nothing to do with desire. To put it in the basest
terms that men, especially, can understand- sexual desire (as example)is a thing beyond reason. Who amongst us has not fantasized about some
woman we barely glimpsed? Even if we are long happily married? A fantastic curve
of ass, a ripened bosom barely contained by brassiere, perfect calves, or a
symmetrical cheekbone hewn from Olympian heights, are not a match for logic.
Want is all. Jimmy Carter’s 1976 admission in Playboy speaks for that
weird- yet all-too natural- desire we all commune with: that momentary (or even
recurring) impulse to forsake love, family, status, position, ethics, etc. for
just a few minutes' naked copulation with some barely-known female whose presumed
essence, or mere carnal appeal is just too much to deny- not its action, mind
you, but its existence. This is the same sort of conundrum that left me unable
to interact in that long ago peachy situation. But it was not sex; rather a
sense of otherness, if not superiority, which impelled my refrain from action.

So, there I stood,
bewildered & drawn to just look at that peach tree from my youth-cum-present
(or what it had become) as I stood in a pre-lighted world where shadow was not a
dark thing that loomed out from the sides of lighter things, but something that
penetrated the real with its own brand of reality. The tree, with its age &
height, a mute being with scant memory, if any, of interacting years earlier
with the odorous creature that gazed unremarkably at it. Surely, beyond my
purview, insect wars still raged over necrotic fruit flesh. Alas, the viewers on
high, who had surveyed them, were gone; too busy with things like rent, car
payments, sexual relationships (or their lack), & assorted aggravations, to
pay mind to the death tides that raged over their increasingly silent
neighborhood. Forgettance was the rule. To forget those struggles, to forget
that youth, to forget friends. Yet, Ricky Gerhardt’s face is always in my mind-
but it is the face of the young boy I knew between the ages of 7 & 14, not
the man who exists today. The same phenomenon exists for all those I have ever
known in the past- they are forever frozen, in memory or dream- as I once knew
them: unaging paragons of a mortal creature’s dissolving foam. There is no
need for a photograph to remind me of this pastness. There is no need to be
haunted by chemicals on cellulose. Ricky, & all those things- from peach tree
to the 1st kiss I ever got- are always & unchanging, etched into
something harder & firmer & immortal. My slight gray inner cranial cells
are no match for their staying power, nor any matter of concern to that which
records all.

Still, there is change.
Sometimes it is sad- like the current & unknown status of my beloved little
lost Chia- but sometimes it is not. Recently I got into touch with the first
girl I ever loved romantically- & unrequitedly. Like me, she is happily
married, but still living in my hometown, quite successful in her chosen career,
& the mother of a 4 year old daughter named Erica. After a month or so of
exchanging emails she sent me some recent photo attachments of her & her
daughter. As the 1 containing the both of them loaded several things struck me-
1st, I knew from the top of her head, which was my former heartthrob-
nearly 2 decades gone but the smile, eyes, hair, etc. were all the same. Perhaps
a little plumper, nevertheless the years had not diminished 1 iota my ability to
recognize her from a mere inch or 2 of her mop of hair. 2ndly there was her
daughter- a tall, beautiful Italianate child- in a photo at once a few weeks old
& marker of the opening gape to come. In mere moments she will be married,
looking at that photo- perhaps sadly if her mother is dead; perhaps warmly if
her mother is alive but somewhere else in the world. She will recognize things
in that photo that are alien to me, & even more quickly than I attuned to
her mother’s 1st wisp of hair. &, somewhere Ricky Gerhardt is
doing whatever it is he does on a routine basis, unaware & perhaps uncaring
that I am still in this world. He will not recall that peach tree, nor retrieving
the spaldeens on the garage roof, nor the sticky tarpaper & its oily scent.
Perhaps his gaze will not have hardened to the extent of mine- he will not have
tasted the despairs of the lot of we human twinklings. Regardless, the Ricky of
my life is always. My 1st love is always that girl I knew, no matter
how subsequence turned its posture toward her. The peach tree was, was, &
probably still is. & the SJG of my mind is forever in the words that
delighted & frustrated. These are those things I continually break &
which continually need breaking to reveal & re-reveal things that total what
I am.

Recently, I took a stand
on principle alone & paid a price. But, I would do it again. This is who I
am, & probably why I am who I am (as well the #1 reason my life has had more
than its fair share of turbulence). To me, the act of standing is as important
(more often than not) as what is being stood for or against. This is 1 of the
best things I take with me when I reckon an SJG- a personal stranger but
occupational comrade-in-arms. He took stands- rightly or wrongly- based on a
defined set of principles- & bore the costs. How many of you readers do?

What Sticks Is What Matters

In his 1977 book, Ever
Since Darwin, SJG wrote: ‘Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective
information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as
artists than as information processors.’ This passage is typical of SJG in its
hyperbolic grandiosity- but, hey that’s mere style. Look at the substance
& you will see flecks that informed his greatness as a writer, if not as a
scientist. Science & the arts are complementary pursuits: in the arts
discovery is used in service to the creative impulse to fashion unrealities
which comfort & evoke us to understand our essence in relation to what is
not us, while science uses the creative impulse in service to discover truths
about realities which discomfit & provoke us to understand what is not us in
relation to our essence. This may not be art nor information processing, but
something in between- & certainly invoking genius is shameless SJG
hyperbole. Nonetheless, he swung his maul, & even a John Henry &/or a
Paul Bunyan would take interest in what the shards that survive him have to say.

Here’s
hoping that my life, my peach tree, my Ricky Gerhardt, etc. will stick as long
with some of you as SJG’s words have with me, or become something equivalent
to your versions of the same. We all need a little hot tarpaper, now & then,
to hold our peaches in place; even if other smaller things quibble over what we
deem ours, for decay is just change, & that is (subjectively) subjective.
I’m sure even SJG would stand with me on that. Come home little Chia!